Print shops are typically medium or large scale facilities capable of supplying printing services to meet a variety of customer demands. For example, print shops are often used to print documents used for mass-mailing (e.g., customer bills, advertisements, etc). Because print shops engage in printing on a scale that is hard to match, their customer base is usually varied. Print shop clients may therefore include both large institutional clients (e.g., credit card companies and banks), and small clients (e.g., small businesses and churches).
Print shops are generally arranged to print incoming jobs from clients in a way that is economical, yet fast. Thus, print shops often include a number of high-volume printers capable of printing incoming jobs quickly and at high quality. These printers may be managed by operators who can remove paper jams and reload the printers with media. Print shops also typically include post-print devices that are used to process the printed documents of each job (e.g., stackers, staplers, cutters, binders, etc.). Because print shops serve a variety of clients, they are often tasked with printing jobs that have varying printing formats, delivery dates, and media requirements. Print shops therefore often use a centralized print server that coordinates activity between printers of the print shop and clients. The print server schedules incoming jobs and forwards them to the printers they are directed to.
Customers with printing needs generate print jobs for the print shop using a variety of tools, such as web interfaces to the print shop, client side tools operated by the customer, etc. When a customer generates a job for the print shop using a variety of different tools, job tickets for the print jobs may be generated in a variety of formats. The formats may be proprietary to a particular customer, software application generating the job ticket, etc. Print jobs include both print data and a job ticket. The job ticket describes the services requested by the customer from the print shop. For example, a job ticket may indicate duplexing, stapling, binding, or other types of services (both print and non-print) that the print shop will perform for the customer. Problems arise when the print shop receives job tickets in a variety of formats, as the print shop may be unable to accurately and efficiently provide the requested services to the customer.